Ok Biz let’s take Bernie to the ball park one more time.
Starting with your last point first, the whole 2007 thing came from your outraged indignation at Jezza’s loose use of wonky stats. Ironically you went to trump him using the spurious method of two periods discrete from each other (2007-2010 vs 2015-17). This immediately raised some red flags about what we were missing in the intervening years. Not to mention that, perhaps just by chance, 2007 and 2010 were top 3 years for attendances for the AFL, WC and Freo.
Anyways moving onto the stats, and while you poo-pooed using WC and AFL stats (while finding a broader definition of “consistently” that includes once), despite them sharing some striking patterns with Freo’s highwater marks. I’m not sure you quite understood how I used the AFL stats.
The AFL stats were used (like the WC ones) to see if those trends were different to Freo’s in the Lyon years. The focus was on the increases/decreases on a year by year basis, so the drop in average attendances from the expansion sides can be neutralised. In fact the combined expansion side attendances grew more or less from year to year anyways.
But, just to clear your mind on it, the take below shows the year by year increases/decreases with the expansion sides and Freo taken out of the AFL variances. I’ve also left out the averages and just kept it to 2011-2015 (pre us meeting the cliff-face) for simplicities sake:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 2011 >> 2012 >>> 2013 >> 2014 >> 2015
Non-Expan/Non-Freo >> -2.6% >> -5.6% >> 2.3% >> -0.1% >> 0.3%
>>>>>>>>>Fremantle >> -6.0% >> -2.9% >> 2.6% >> 4.9% >> 0.8%
So again we can see that during Lyon’s years, pre-2016, any decreases were less than the AFL’s (non-expansion sides), while increases were greater. This is not to say Freo were ahead of the curve, but that the gameplan theory is not supported by the stats.
And finally, while I can appreciate you softening your stance on the gameplan-attendances theory, even allowing for corrosive club changes disaffecting fans amongst other factors, you original stance was that the game plan has created poor attendances.
